Walter Russell Meade on how envrionmentalists and the mainstream media joined hands to screw up environmental policy for decades.

People who care about the environment, who worry about the potential harm that our increasingly technological civilization can do to the natural systems on which we all depend, are making a literally planet-threatening mistake when they fail to subject policy proposals to serious analysis and critique because those proposals are labeled ‘green’. I don’t know what it will take to get this simple lesson through the surprisingly thick heads of the chattering classes.  How many times do widely hailed, ritualistically praised and endorsed green policy initiatives have to go down in flames before the press realizes that the way to help the environment is to subject such proposals to critical scrutiny before they flop?

How long will it be before serious people who seriously care about the environment realize that the clowns, poseurs and hotheads currently shaping the movement’s public agenda constitute a grave and urgent threat to the health of the only planet we’ve got.